Posts Tagged ‘screenshots’

Voting’s almost at an end! The theme ended up helping to create way more cool games than I ever expected. I’m still going to be playing some this evening and tomorrow, and luckily you can do the same! You can check out my entry Hush below. It’s a mini musical matching game!

I fell asleep last night before posting this little update, but Team Rehab performed admirably until late in the evening, here’s a little gif of something actually happening. Still a lot of work to do today to make it what we envisioned on those whiteboards. Let’s get cracking… after some coffee and toast.

Jacob (known as jtpup0), and I got about three hours in last night before we decided to call it a night and catch some sleep.

We started working on a game called Doorman. Our unconventional weapon? Doors. Yes, doors.

No, you’re not throwing the doors at people, instead you are placing doors around the level. You can use your doors to grant yourself access to other rooms you wouldn’t normally have access to, or even place a door in the floor and have an enemy fall through it!

Who is the doorman? Well…

The doorman used to be the doorman for a big shot top secret tech company, but instead he’s breaking in to find the company’s secrets and revealing them to the world.

It’ll be a fun little action/puzzle game, and feature pretty fun gameplay (if I do say so myself…).

Here’s a Vine Jacob recorded of just the player moving around and a little bit of the door creation… There’s also some screenshots I took from the Unity editor below it. Still a lot to do, but we’re moving along pretty quickly for just three hours of work last night!

I want to create a timelapse video with screenshots showing what I’m doing during. I’m on OS X and made this script to help me do that: screencapture.rb

You pass a directory as argument, that directory is created and every 5 seconds a screenshot is saved there. The script can be killed and when running it again with the same directory, it will continue saving screenshots, in another “session” folder.

I had fully intended to not enter this Ludum Dare, mostly because I managed to convince myself that I should be doing other things. No idea what those other things were now, but I’ll probably remember them again afterwards.

Anyway, the theme is a bit bland; I decided to make a ‘runner’ game.

Here’s a screenshot:

The game goes on until a certain point, randomly generating platforms (There is one consistent platform at the bottom of the screen). The challenge factor will be the introduction of collectible items and lots of rockets to dodge (Thus the game’s name). I’m intending for there to be a tank or war-machine of some sort at the end that you have to destroy somehow. Still working out the details.

This is my second Ludum Dare, and this time I have managed to actually finish a game, not just abandon one. The game is called Pineapple Dreams—it is my first fast-paced action game. The theme was “You Are the Villain,” so I made something as a tribute to the good old ultra-violence. That said, malchiki and devochki, I give you Pineapple Dreams—go kill yourself some humans now!

I have also discovered that (at least for me) the key to a successful LD48 is no level design and/or artwork/animation, because those things take all the time. Having those time-consuming things out of the way, I managed to compose a tune for this game that I’m rather happy with. I even recorded a couple of sounds and integrated them properly. And I slept two full nights during this LD, which is completely unthinkable.

2 Thirds October Challenge

I started developing my game on October 1st and I would say I’m am actually about 2/3 of the way to completing the game.

This is a sort of log of what I went through to get to this stage.

Week 1

Idea

Not much time was spent thinking of an idea. I was determined this time to make a game that I myself want to play even if it was an existing game. With that in mind, I chose the game mechanic (drop7 by Zynga, originally from area/code) and thought about what I’d like it to have to be more appealing to me.

More colour

More character

More particles

Adventure Mode

The first 3 are just visual things, but they make a difference to the feel of the game and as a graphic designer/illustrator it’s kind of important to me.

Adventure mode: I’ve yet to implement this as I’ve had many many ideas on how to do it. I know how I want the player to feel. I want them to want to progress, to want to beat levels and explore the world I’ll make for the game.

Platform

It’s definitely a mobile game. I intend it to be played in short bursts, 5 minutes here or there. Options:

iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch)

Android (Phones, Tablets)

Windows Phone

These were the 3 platforms I was thinking of. I’d love to do a windows phone, but not owning one means testing is just can’t happen.

That leaves iOS and Android. Now, I have a couple of really old iOS devices to play with but developing for iOS will cost me $99. That is $99 I don’t have. So, we’re down to Android, a mere $25.

So I’m developing for Android. That will require me to know Java. Which I don’t know well.

There are a few other options for developing for Android, the 2 I looked at were

Phone Gap

Unity

I don’t know Unity and I don’t want to spend too much time learning something new when I only have 1 month to complete my game.

From what I understand about PhoneGap, it throws HTML5/JS into a webkit browser on your phone as if it were it’s own app.

Well, I’m very familiar with javascript, so I’ll give PhoneGap a go. (Spoiler: it doesn’t work out)

Time to get started.

Coding went pretty smooth for my first prototype. I had much of the game working by the end of the week.

The code itself was a huge mess. I was just learning about MVC architecture and attempted to implement it as I went along. BAD MOVE. The code just got worse and worse and became unworkable.

Week 2

Rebuild!

My code was a mess. At this stage in my life as a game developer, I’ve gotten accustomed to re-writing all my code from scratch and that’s exactly what I did.

I re-coded the whole thing in about a day. It went amazingly well. I changed the grid model from something overcomplicated (list of tile entities) to something super simple (jagged array with integers) and wow was that the best thing I ever did. Coding from here on out was a breeze.

By the end of the week, the game was working and had the added benefit of being able to change the grid size on the fly. I played around with 4-10 grid sizes. Funny thing, 7 grid spaces was the magic number in terms of fun and difficulty.

I tested the game on various browsers and touch device browsers. Turns out Safari is a dick and doesn’t support “.bind()” which a significant part of my event system. That was a pain to sort out, but I ended up adding some code so that it would work on browsers that don’t support it.

Weird thing, the game worked super fast on my old iPad 1 (Safari) but slow on my Nexus S (Chrome). Craziness.

Time to test out Phone Gap. I copied my files over into Eclipse. Tested it. It didn’t work. Crap.

Pre-rendering. All my sprites were resized and pre-rendered into their own canvases.

Non-full screen clearRects. I only re-drew things on the screen that changed.

Layered Canvas and draws on their own layers. Turns out this actually made things slower despite there being significantly less re-draws.

Frame skipping. Well.. this really had the same effect, everything was just as choppy as before.

Well, clearly javascript was just not going to cut it.

Now, this isn’t to say PhoneGap is terrible for games (it is), I had right from the very beginning a particle system that I was unwilling to part with. It added some 100+ particles on the screen every time something happened and is the sole reason for laggy perfomance.

oh and I want my game to run at 60 FPS. None of this flimsy 30 FPS.

Week 3

Hey that’s this week!

I decided to re-write the whole thing over in Java.

I knew that the hardest part of this would be getting the thing up and running because really, to me, regardless of the language, all games are the same thing.

Game Loop

Game Logic

Game Rendering

The things that were different were;

Game Loop Code. Involves pausing threads and what not.

Event system. Turns out you can’t pass a method reference as an argument. There are work arounds and I ended up passing anonymous functions but I wasn’t happy with it and ended up scrapping my whole event system. I didn’t actually need, it was more a proof of concept.

As for the game logic, it just so happens I write my Javascript like I write my C#/Java. So it was mostly just copying and pasting with some type declarations.

I’ve just finished writing much of the code for rendering/drawing.

It works! and fast! and that’s just in the emulator, on my crappy old phone it’s super awesome.

So that’s where I’m at right now.

Things on my to do list:

Particle system

Title Screen

Score Keeping/Submission

Implementing ads for free version

Adventure Mode

Hats

I expect to have the game ready for submission some time next week. Initial version won’t have adventure mode. It’s not a vital part of the game, just a bit of variety/fun.

So yep, this has been my process for making one of the simplest of simple game development over-complicated.

I hope you all enjoyed the themes “not-games” and “real real-time” as much as I did. I wanted people to think about the rigid definitions of what games are and if those definitions even are necessary to create interesting and compelling experiences. And yes, most of the entrants succeeded in surprising and entertaining me – for that I want to thank you all, and also for forgiving the somewhat too long theme announcement.

Possibly too many things. At the moment, chaos is a feature and nothing’s certain. Quite fitting 😉

Also got some basic sfx in. Need and better a gorilla and a two more models. Then onto establishing some objectives. Haven’t decided on the mutants yet, might just go for gene variety, reproduction and, well… a surprise at the end.